New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently allow spyware to be installed without authorisation. The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means.
There have also been proposals to extend the exemptions granted to telecom providers to include the installation of programs without the user’s express consent, which Geist says will ‘leave the door open to private, surreptitious surveillance — via Slashdot
Geoff McCormack, a student at Deakin University, had a fascinating idea for a final project — to send a balloon up 30,000 metres into the stratosphere with a digital camera attached. The university was supportive, and the project took shape. Although there were some serious hitches along the way, the project was successful, and he managed to retrieve the balloon — with the pictures. What’s really amazing is that the total cost was so low; the most expensive part was buying the helium gas for approximately AU$250 — via Slashdot
Australia’s peak science body has earned a $200 million windfall — and counting — from its long-running patent battles with the world’s biggest computer companies. The CSIRO yesterday delivered its best results in five years, recording a surplus of $122 million in the 2009 financial year — more than twice the size of last year’s. It had been budgeting for a $34.2 million loss. Despite the economic downturn, the CSIRO earned $634.8 million in royalties from its own inventions — the largest amount it has ever recorded and a 74 per cent increase on just two years ago. Much of this success relates to a patent granted to it in 1996 that the CSIRO argues is essential for setting up wireless networks. It claims the technology is used in more than 800 million devices right now
Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right. According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting in July. And they may ultimately gain the right to a 100Mb broadband connection. Just more than a year ago, Finland said it would make a 100Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday’s announcement is considered an intermediate step
The Guardian newspaper was forbidden by a judge from reporting a question in UK parliament. The press’s freedom to do so has been fought for since at least 1688 and fully acknowledged since the 19th century. At issue was a matter of public record — but the country’s libel laws meant that the newspaper could not inform the public of what parliament was up to. The question concerned the oil trading company Trafigura, the toxic waste scandal they are involved in, and their generous use of libel lawyers to silence those who would report on the whole thing. After tweeters and bloggers shouted about Trafigura all over the Internet, the company’s lawyers agreed to drop the gag request — via Slashdot
Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) web sites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still
An international expert on ATM card skimming gangs has warned Australia is seen as a soft target because of large withdrawal limits and old ATM technology. Chief inspector Elvis Tudose, from the Romanian police, delivered the warning at the National Identity Crime Symposium being held on the Gold Coast yesterday. Inspector Tudose told reporters international criminals were willing to take the risk of being caught because the massive profits far outweigh any punishment a first offender is likely to be given in Australia
Since the financial crisis, Iceland has been forced to retreat back from high octane bubble living to nature. Fortunately, there is a lot of that nature to retreat to. It is a breathtaking world of volcanoes, endless prairies and ethereal winter landscapes. Not, you might think, the most obvious place to stick millions of the world’s computer servers which are, for all their uses, rather less attractive. But the country now wants exactly that — to become home to the world’s computing power. Behind all the large internet companies lurk massive and ever growing data centres chock full of servers churning away. Google for instance is thought to have around a million of the things, but even less IT intensive operations, banks for example, need hundreds of thousands of servers to store all their data
Australian Kindle users will have to pay at least 20 per cent more than Americans for books on the Amazon e-book readers and the local publishing industry has expressed serious reservations about supporting the gizmo
The US House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of a computing era in Washington, DC. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed quasi-celebrity status
within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House’s inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support
The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) had sent iiNet over 1000 copyright infringement notifications over a seven-day period, the Federal Court heard yesterday. The notifications that AFACT and other copyright owner lobbyists had sent to iiNet over a period of about five months totalled more than 7500, iiNet’s barrister Richard Cobden told the court. He also said that AFACT and other copyright owner groups’ requests persistently asked the ISP to cut its customers’ services off. Cobden said the volume of AFACT’s notifications were akin to spam, and that iiNet had suffered a constant bombardment
of notifications, which, he said, were unreasonable and burdensome
Book geeks in New Zealand yesterday went woohoo
that Amazon’s shipping the Kindle ebook reader to the region now, and WTF?
when they realised the device will bypass Aotearoa. Why would you do that, Amazon? New Zealanders also read books and it’s a bigger market than Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Wallis and Futuna for instance, all locations that Amazon’s happy to ship the Kindle to
Amazon’s hyped e-reader Kindle is coming to Australia, with plans for the device to begin shipping on 19 October. Until now, the popular e-reader has only been available to customers in the US. Now, however, the Kindle is being sold in countries across the globe. International readers, including those from Australia can pre-order the device on this site. The price for the international Kindle sits at US$279. A spokesperson for the company said that there would likely be an Australian price but it had not been released as yet
In August the bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay was ordered by a court to disconnect the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker from the Internet. Within hours the site had relocated to a new host which immediately received similar entertainment industry threats. Now it seems the Bay has left Sweden, setting sail for Ukraine
This week the Annals of Improbable Research hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. This year was no less ignoble than the previous 18, with such delightful discoveries as applications for panda poo and observations from a lifetime of knuckle cracking. Except for one award: the gas mask bra, which, while ridiculous and hilarious at face value, has far more going on below the neckline. Elena Bodnar, who lives in Chicago, got her start as a scientist in Ukraine, when she witnessed the devastating effects of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in 1986. She noticed, among other things, that women were wearing bras that may have been lacy but were certainly not life-saving
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group has begun to offer free Wi-Fi wireless internet access in over 100 locations across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, in an act of generosity to last the next few months. Customers in 46 Melbourne, 46 Sydney and 10 Brisbane cafes will receive free Wi-Fi from the bank for the month of October
The US government has ended its 11-year contract with the nonprofit body, ICANN, that oversees key aspects of the Internet’s architecture, after demands from other countries for more say in how the Web works. The move addresses mounting criticism in recent years that no one country should have sole control over important underpinnings of the Internet, such as determining domain name suffixes like .com
An Australian inventor, who was set to reap the lion’s share of a mammoth $US388 million ($445 million) damages award from Microsoft, is now set to get nothing after the US judge hearing the case decided to ignore the jury’s decision and hand victory to Microsoft. Ric Richardson, who divides his time between Northern Rivers in NSW and California, is the founder of Uniloc, which sued Microsoft in 2003 for violating its patent relating to technology designed to deter software piracy. The company alleged Microsoft earned billions of dollars by using the technology in its Windows XP and Office programs
The Pirate Party, which champions issues such as intellectual property rights, free speech and data privacy, is on its way to becoming an official party in Australia. The party is gathering followers with the hope of achieving the 500 exclusive members needed to achieve official registered party status in the eyes of the Australian Electoral Commission
Bletchley Park, the wartime intelligence centre, has achieved a breakthrough which could mean that its historic wooden huts are saved from going to rot. There is now a high chance that the Enigma machines, which cracked the codes used by the Nazi high command, will be able to go back into the hut where they were first housed. The trust that runs the site has been awarded a grant by the National Lottery which is the first step towards a much larger award, totalling more than £4m
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